The Typology of Iranian Government Policy Narratives in Confronting with the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)

The outbreak of the coronavirus in 2020 led the Iranian policymakers to narrate different stories and make their decisions, accordingly. The purpose of this study is to identify the narratives of the Iranian government in the face of the pandemic.

This is a qualitative case study conducted by applying a thematic analysis. Accordingly, the texts of the decisions made by the Iranian policy-makers were thematically analyzed and then labeled as narratives. The derived narratives were analyzed, successively.

Four distinct narratives in policy-making decisions under the Covid-19 pandemic were extracted, including the narrative of the need to reduce activities to combat disease, the narrative of the need to continue activities, the anti-sanctions narrative, and the narrative of knowledge-based production and economics.

The development of the policy narrative framework enables the policymakers to classify their decisions and policies within the narrative framework and to turn their intellectual apparatus into a tangible narrative for their audiences. This article combined the form and the content dimensions of the policy narrative framework and presented a new conceptual framework for it, which describes and analyzes the policy narratives more comprehensively.